On the Role of Vibrational Excitation in Hypersonic Flow Computation

The paper investigates the influence of the thermochemical modeling on the flow-field properties for both compressing and expanding flows. For the nitrogen hypersonic flow over a cylinder a comparison between a model neglecting vibrational energy and two-temperature Park‘s nonequilibrium model has been performed in a wide variety of experimental and free flight conditions. It is shown that the differences are confined in a thin layer behind the bow shock while the overall flow properties are slightly affected. For the expanding air flows inside hypersonic facilities, besides the two models mentioned above, vibrational equilibrium and CVDV model have been compared. It was found that vibrational nonequilibrium can not be disregarded but no discernible differences have been observed between Park‘s and CVDV model results, unless the enthalpy is very large.